jveld

Enough with the 'woe humanity the machines are coming' pieces. After ten years of facebook, and three years of snowden leaks, I have a hard time finding sympathy for people who purchase 'smart' (read data gathering) devices from large conglomerates before considering the privacy implications. The cards are on the table; we all know what the terms of this kind of convenience are. If you're concerned for your privacy, then stop opting in for fucks sake. You've just voted with your dollars for a future of ubiquitous, autonomous surveillance. Again. Knowingly. The ignorance card is utter bullshit at this point.

The 'inevitable' future bewailed by these types of articles is only inevitable because this kind of 'shiny! buynow thinklater' mentality. To paraphrase Sartre, "we have the surveillance state we deserve."

If you're comfortable with the tradeoffs, I have no beef. I'm not saying that people shouldn't buy these things if they want them. And they are cool, wantable things. But it's 2016. You can have your thing or your soapbox. Both are respectable choices. But you can only have one.

Fascinating! I wonder if Tolstoy was depecting Dostoevsky. I guess I'll have to read War and Peace as my enormous literary undertaking of the summer.

Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov, Crime And Punishment) was sentenced to be executed by the Tsarist government in 1849. He was actually in front of the firing squad, waiting for his turn to die, when he learned that his sentence had been commuted to a measly 10 years hard labor in Siberia.

One could argue that this was the defining moment of his life, and most of his greatest works were motivated in some way by the intensity of that experience. So yeah, for lots more on this, read Dostoevsky.

It occurs to me that my analogy with categories and functors is itself a transport between the language game of category theory and the language game of language games.

Bahahahahaha! Brilliant.

If I remember my category theory correctly, wouldn't this mean that you've discovered a Monad between the language game of category theory and the language game of language games?

If so, we could create the most incomprehensible monad tutorial yet written! Now there's a real achievement.

@jhedwards: My mistake - I guess I associated the term "logographic" with the idea that modern chinese characters represent "ideas," which is mostly false. My comment was aimed at the "pictographic" misconception, and was meant to agree with yours, which I evidently read too quickly.

In modern written mandarin, each character corresponds to a spoken syllable, which roughly corresponds to a morpheme, although sometimes it seems that without the writing system to differentiate the vast number of homophones in the language, the morpheme-syllable correspondence would get murky very fast. Which is indeed a manifestly logographic element of the writing system

It seemed to me like the author of the article was playing a bit loose with Wittgenstein's ideas. Isn't the idea that gravity is merely a "translation" of the curvature of spacetime an example of precisely the kind of Tractatus-speak that the language game idea was meant to demolish? Or am I missing something.

I recently realized that the logographic misconception about Chinese writing probably stems from the pretty recent past when Classical Chinese was the sole written form, and thus certain characters represented a common meaning to speakers across dialects. Of course, it's still not historically accurate to describe even Classical Chinese as purely "logographic" (for that matter, even Egyptian hieroglyphs have phonetic elements), but at least it explains the misconception somewhat

I did confess the pedantry of my amusement-but-sometimes-irritation. I'll indulge myself to point out any substantive translation between two languages will involve expanding some words into phrases while some phrases may be condensed into words. The deeper irony of this way of presenting the issue is that it's usually ubiquitous and common words, which tend to have complex situational meanings that map very messily between languages.

For example, the English word power translates both pouvier and puissance from French, an imbalance which forces translators into circumlocutions that I lack the patience to attempt to explain on my tablet [1]. Which is to say, they are decidedly not matter-of-fact.

Its the presence of these ordinary words that really are problematic to translate that feeds my reaction here. By singling out highly-specified words that are unlikely to exist but straightforward to express, the real heart of the translation issue is actually obscured. What's worse is that this misleading and cursory method of explanation has become a sin twice over by embedding itself as a worn-out pop-science cliche. By now you may have surmised that I didn't sleep too much last night.

Having got that off my chest, I will now stop soapboxing all over this really quite fascinating article.

[1] this distinction has been heavily discussed however, as it's important in the work of several famous theorists. a googling should yield explanations.

For instance, there is no English translation for the Japanese wabi-sabi—the idea of finding beauty in imperfection—or for the German waldeinsamkeit, the feeling of being alone in the woods.

Writers who proclaim that English has no translation for word x from language y, only to provide a matter-of-fact translation in the very next clause/sentence always make me chuckle.

Or they provoke pedantic ire. Depends on how much sleep I've had. :p

I agree, thus my suggestion that we try and move towards apprenticeships. But I think we should avoid framing apprenticeships/bootcamps/whatever as a replacement for universities, and instead frame them as an alternative.

addendum: imagine how self-referential and masturbatory Turing's 1936 paper would have seemed from the perspective of the time, especially given that it was written during the depths of the depression.

I realize that it's a stretch to imagine university bureaucrats changing their ways. That's why I think that academics and educators should tenaciously promote the value of education for its own sake, rather than trying to attach the value of education to some economic measurement. It's the use of this kind of rhetoric by academics themselves that unsettles me - for bureaucrats it's simply par for the course.

> The fact that academia itself doesn't want to hire its own children suggest even further that academia needs to focus on vocational skills, so that academics can transfer out into a "post-academic" career.

Or perhaps it suggests that University administrators should stop treating their professorate as factories for research "products," who must continually publish to avoid being fired.

Emotional beauty is a multiplayer game. It's created when people use their time and energy to break the script and let the people around them know that they are valued. It's not something that's easy to just receive passively - in order to experience it frequently one needs to be bold and sensitive. Above all, one needs to be patient.

I grew up in an environment where nobody every expressed themselves. I was also given the impression that I was the smartest person in town. This is not a combination that makes for deep human connections. But I was fortunate enough to have the friendships of several very charismatic people over the years. Their ability to make instant connections with basically everybody around them seemed magical, and remained mysterious for years. But as I watched them and gradually opened myself, I found that skilled observation wasn't enough. Not only did I need to be open to others and willing to say what was on my mind, I also had to drop my pretensions and try to engage people on their own terms, even if those terms were things I would have previously found silly, like tarot or fireplace ceramics. When I've been successful at this (which isn't all the time, but it happens more and more), I've made new friends and learned all kinds of weird and interesting things. Even though the same period has contained some of the roughest periods of my life, I can honestly say that I've never been happier to be alive, and it's the beauty I find in small, everyday human connections that keeps me going.

The tendency to characterize educational institutions as 'factories' for producing intellectual laborers (or knowledge workers, to use a synonomous but less harsh sounding term) is deeply unsettling to me. Although this piece mainly presents the author's arguments for bootcamp-contra-university in terms of her positive cultural experiences, these aren't presented on the strength of their own merits. The argument is (as usual), that the author's favored approach would increase the efficiency of the technology for transforming unskilled laborers into skilled laborers. Although this might seem like a hair splitting point, I think that this view of education causes larger problems than irritating continental-philosophy-reading, freeBSD-loving overall curmudgeons like yours truly.

Education in America was never intended to produce laborers. In fact, the "liberality" of those arts which form a traditional university curriculum doesn't refer to their tendency to attract war protesters, communists, or critical theorists: these "liberal" arts are the arts of free men (free as in speech, not beer, yada yada), who would need a deep understanding of history and culture to prepare them for participation in political life. Historically, this freedom was enjoyed only by clerics and aristocrats. The hope of democratic societies is to extend political agency to ever broadening sectors of society, and to base political agency upon merit, rather than social caste. Universal education, it was argued, would produce the citizens that a large democracy would need, which would compensate for the fact that receiving such an education reduces one's available time for labor. One might recall that summer vacations were conceived to alleviate the imposition that schooling represented on a families ability to avail themselves of the labor of their offspring [1].

Now would be a reasonable time to point out to me that political agency and economic welfare aren't exactly cleanly seperable goals, and that I'm still actually just splitting hairs, and that jobs are important by golly! Point taken. But here's the punchline: I would argue that out confusion about the purpose of higher education has caused us as a society to waste a huge amount of effort 'fixing' universities to accomodate the needs of industry, rather than investing in new strategies - I think that a concerted effort to create an apprenticeship system for training IT workers (and probably other kinds of workers too) would better suit the needs of businesses, as well as the tastes of more restless students, at a vastly reduced expense. Freed from the pressure to teach industry-ready but highly transient skills, universities could be preserved as places to learn deep, ready for students who have a knack for academic work, or have become interested in the theoretical aspects of their practical work. As it stands, the standoff between vocational and traditional perspectives is undermining our ability to teach both theory and praxis.

It's also led to the illusion that the quality of an education can be more or less straightforwardly quantified using crude economic heuristics. Maybe nobody actually believes that this is a good way to evaluate education, but the demand for such quanititative measures nevertheless persists -- to the great detriment of students and faculty. Since no individual element of a University experience can be easily correlated with these "measurements" of educational excellence, the approach by business-oriented administrators seems to be something like "let's see how much we can cut without making people too angry [2]." Of course, neither the constant cutting of less 'profitable' programs, nor the withering wages of the underclass of adjuncts has stopped the university administrations from availing themselves of the near-infinite price elasticity afforded them by the finincial aid system -- after all, it is all about the bottom line, isn't it?

[1] Everything about this paragraph is pretty drastically oversimplified. For a fuller exposition of these ideas as they were expressed in the relevant historical period, check out John Dewey's Democracy and Education, published in 1916.

[2] I don't mean to imply that University administrators are moustache-twiddling evil capitalists out to suck the education system dry. It's just that, faced with the task of administering a complex system with difficult-to-measure outputs, people who are trained in business and generally encouraged to view their task in business terms seem to settle into this approach.

I'm in favor of a move from ad-based to paywalled content. It just feels more honest to sell your content than your readers (or viewers, visitors, etc).

There's also a mental hygeine aspect: I've noticed a pretty distinct correlation between my total exposure to online advertising and my ability to reach states of deep focus. For example, I've been finding it extremely difficult to finish books for the past few years. But since February or so, as my exposure to online ads has dropped to nearly zero, I've knocked half a dozen challenging non-fiction works off my hit list, and a few novels to boot. And it's not just mental stamina -- my moment to moment engagement and comprehension is also much higher.

This observation is anecdotal, and furthermore, poorly controlled, so establishing causality is pretty difficult. But I have noticed that when I DO browse facebook or other ad-heavy sites, I experience a significant drop in my level of mental energy, often for hours after I'm off the internet. It's as if viewing ads, which are designed to grab one's attention, forks a process in my brain whose task is to react to the ad content, thus depleting my brain-hardware resources. The social hooks make facebook a particularly bad culprit.

BUT, there's a big caveat. I don't want subscriptions -- at least, not on every site that sometimes puts out content that I like. That would cost me hundreds of buxx a month that I simply can't afford. There needs to be a decent micropayment solution so that people can buy the content that they actually want without the overhead of paying for a bunch of stuff they don't care about. I speculate that this would be a pure win for content companies. Right now, paywalls are more like "go-away-walls." If there were buttons on paywalls that said "Read this article for 50 cents," I would personally be paying for a lot more articles. There's probably even a good business opportunity in mediating these transactions to centralize signups and aggregate purchased content.

good point - for some reason it hadn't clicked that number theory only involves the integers and not, ya know, complex numbers.

Here's how I explain "pure math" to people, based on my experience taking a highly theory-oriented linear algebra course and thinking that "this stuff couldn't possibly be useful." Boy, was I wrong...

I think of (pure) mathematics as exploring the structures generated by simple rules. You start with some system of axioms, maybe those of group theory or linear algebra, and you see where it takes you. Often, there are richer, but closely related structures available by adding additional axioms or constraints. For example, add commutativity to group theory and you get abelian groups. Add metrics to vector spaces and you get topology (sorta).

This is useful because the world is full of complex systems that emerge from simple rules. Therefore, when we observe that some system in the real world displays the characteristics of a known mathematical structure, we inherit a bunch of free knowledge about that system.

In practice, most math falls on some spectrum between the above definition and "applied math". Historically speaking, it's a pretty modern idea (although its pedigree begins with Euclid). Before the mid-nineteenth century, mathematicians had indeed been chasing puzzles like "how to find the roots of polynomials" and "can you square a circle using constructions?" for several centuries. And puzzles are certainly not dead, as the millenium prize clearly shows. Number theory also doesn't play nice with this definition. I intentionally ignored that - if I start thinking about the ontology of numbers I risk losing quite a bit of sleep :p.

Why the ad hominem?

I understood the scope of the OP's suggestion. I just thought it could've been presented more clearly. The fact that tons of the comments here are directed at the idea of this notation as a replacement would seem to bear this out.

For my thoughts on the notation itself, see this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9831337

Here are some shortcomings I thought of immediately.

- Traditional notation is instrument-agnostic.

- It may be easily printable, but a staff is easily writable. With just a pen and a ruler, I can produce a neat staff in ~10 seconds. The ruler is optional if I don't care about prettiness. With this, you more or less have to print it: getting the spacing right by hand would be quite difficult.

- I have mixed feelings about the the traditional representation of key. Missing a sharp or flat in an unfamiliar key is probably my most common error when reading sheet music. OTOH, The traditional notation tells me which sharps and flats to use. With this system, I have to already know the structure of C# major if I want to noodle around (always). This would seem to be more hostile to beginners.

- The precision issue has already been brought up many times, but I would add that all the lost information is an archival disaster. It might seem superfluous since we have recordings, but given the rate of change in technology, access to data in old formats is by no means a certainty. Since this notation basically requires you to have heard the song in order to play it, it would become incomprehensible pretty quickly.

It seems to me that most of the complexity of musical notation reflects the "essential" complexity of actually playing the music. For example, consider key: even at the level of simple rock songs, a basic grasp of "key" is absolutely essential, and if you're playing a piano, this means you have to know which sharps and flats to use. If this seems pedantic, consider that the main difficulty of learning to play a piece is dexterity. It's going to take a bit of effort just to make your fingers hit the damn keys. Since this effort has to take place anyway, the little bit of extra effort to learn notation doesn't seem like much to ask. Besides, the amount of notation required to play pop songs is relatively small - that rendition of "Let it Be" contains about 10 symbols, most of which are related.

This isn't to say that traditional notation is perfect, or even good. It is rather baroque, and I'm open to a "redesign," as long as it really solves the problem. This redesign isn't useless, but its scope of usefulness seems so limited that I'm not really sure it's worth it.

Yes, but since he frames it in the title as a "redesign," it's hard to get out of the frame of thinking about it as such. If he had titled it "A Simpler Notation for Piano Music" or something, his intent would've been clearer.

But then again, probably wouldn't have gotten to the front page without the word "redesign"

Thanks for the correction! It's been a couple years since I've actually done any calculus. I couldn't remember the exact function, so I had to google - I guess I read too quickly.

I've thought it was paradoxical that infinitely long curves could have finite integrals ever since I first took calculus. For example, the integral of 1/x is |ln x|.

I wonder why it takes three dimensions before people start getting upset.

It got the job done by making the 99% majority of use cases more difficult in order to make the 1% minority simpler. This is a design pattern I think is being repeated in systemd.

I kinda had the opposite impression. I first encountered systemd when I started messing around with arch for a couple little vps projects. At the time I was doing sysadmin that involved both Ubuntu and CentOS, and I definitely found day-to-day tasks easier with systemd (better built in monitoring, consistent syntax, etc). For simple cases, writing a unit file sucks a lot less than writing an initscript. The warts in systemd only started to irritate me when I was first setting up my personal machines (one laptop, one tower) to run arch [1]. Even then, the bloat in the design irked me more than actually using it. So, I'm in favor of systemd, but not thrilled (dbus everywhere is annoying).

Then again, I don't maintain any packages with strange and/or complex daemons. If anybody's had a really hard time getting their stuff to work with systemd, I'd be interested to hear stories.

1: Not completely true. I want my damn log files back.

Reading Stallman these days always gives me such mixed feelings. I appreciate the fuck out of all the work he's done for the software community, and admire his courage and willingness to stand out. Overall, I think his agenda to keep the power of computing available to everybody is extremely important. Now more than ever, with computers everywhere and internet of things seemingly just over the horizon.

But these terminological squabbles seem to me like the worst kind of bikeshedding. Open source may have began as a way to depoliticize free software, but the battle has ended and "open source" has won. People who are not advanced computer users have never heard of "Free Software," the FSF, GNU, or Richard Stallman. On the other hand, "open source" software has some name recognition among folks like, say, my mother. Young developers (such as myself), have discovered Free Software through an original interest in "open source."

With that in mind, I think it would make sense to just use the terminology people are comfortable with, and continue making the same distinction by promoting "ethical open source" or "permissive open source" or something like that. If the worry really is that the language around open source is everywhere scrubbed of the original free software ethos (I'm not too sure about that), a sensible move would be counter that by staking out a corner of "open source" and using it to promote ethical software. Chastising people for the way they speak just sows hostility among potential friends.

Stallman always talks about the importance of language, and Orwell's shadow is clearly visible over these rants. But "open source" isn't euphamistic doublespeak - it's not inherently more difficult to think about ethical software when you call it open source instead of free. From an outside perspective, the only difference is that "free software" has a confusing double meaning that "open source" doesn't. Free software (or whatever) already is fighting a battle for relevance. Why choose an uphill battle?

FOOTNOTE: The fact that Stallman's pet terminology is always linked to his personal organizations also damages his credibility. It makes it easy to dismiss him as sour grapes. I personally think he deserves recognition, but then again, there's no shortage of software named after GNU...

To me, the defining feature is automation. A "programmable" system is one where smaller actions can be composed into larger ones and saved for invocation later (by name, in response to some event, etc). I don't know much about photoshop, but judging from what people have said, it seems to meet this definition.

I will concede that "programming," in the sense of "I've been programming for the last couple hours" or "He isn't very good at programming" implies the use of a Turing complete language. Photoshop would probably fail here, along with more programmer-y things like writing html.